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Holocaust denial

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Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?

Holocaust denial is the claim that the mainstream historical version of the Holocaust is either highly exaggerated or completely falsified.

Holocaust denial and Holocaust revisionism

Holocaust deniers prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Many people contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information. Broadly, it is the approach that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate and should be revised accordingly. Historical revisionism in this sense is a well-accepted and mainstream part of history studies. It may be applied to the Holocaust as well, as new facts emerge and change our understanding of its events.

Holocaust deniers maintain that they apply proper revisionist principles to Holocaust history, and therefore the term Holocaust revisionism is appropriate for their point of view. However, their critics disagree and prefer the term Holocaust denial. Gordon McFee writes in his essay "Why Revisionism isn't" that:

"Revisionists" depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology [...], thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head." [1]

In general, the term Holocaust denial fits the description at the beginning of this article, while Holocaust revisionism ranges from holocaust denial through the belief that only minor corrections are required to Holocaust history. However, because the latter term has become associated with Holocaust deniers, mainstream historians today generally avoid using it to describe themselves. Thus Holocaust revisionism has come to be understood as revisionist history, rather than historical revisionism.

Beliefs of Holocaust deniers and revisionists

Holocaust deniers and revisionists make all or most of the following claims:

  1. There was no specific order by Adolf Hitler or other top Nazi officials to exterminate the Jews.
  2. Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews.
  3. The figure of six million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and that many Jews that actually emigrated to Russia, Britain, Israel and the United States are included in the number.
  4. Film footage shown after World War II was all specially manufactured as propaganda against the Nazis by the Allied forces. For example, one film, shown to Germans after the war, of supposed Holocaust victims were in fact German civillians being treated after allied bombing.
  5. Claims of what the Nazis supposedly did to the Jews were all intended to facilitate the Allies in their intention to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
  6. Although crimes were committed, they were not centrally orchestrated and thus the Nazi leadership bore no responsibility for the implementation of such a policy.
  7. Historical proof for the Holocaust is falsified or deliberately misinterpreted.
  8. There is an American, British or Jewish conspiracy to make Jews look like victims and to demonize Germans. Also, it was in the Soviet's interest to propagate wild stories about Germany in order to frighten related nations into accepting communist rule (Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.).
  9. The overwhelming number of biased academics and historians are too afraid to actually admit that the Holocaust was a fiction; they know they will lose their jobs if they speak up.

Most Holocaust deniers also stress that, contrary to popular belief:

  1. they do not deny that Jews were persecuted under the Third Reich;
  2. they do not deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights;
  3. they do not deny that Jews were deported;
  4. they do not deny the existence of Jewish ghettos;
  5. they do not deny the existence of concentration camps;
  6. they do not deny the existence of crematoriums in concentration camps;
  7. they do not deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons, although they claim there were no mass murders;
  8. they do not deny that other minorities were also persecuted such as gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and political dissenters;
  9. and finally, they do not deny that all of the above mentioned things were unjust.

Holocaust denial examined

For a detailed treatment of arguments used against Holocaust deniers, see Holocaust denial examined.

Holocaust denial is a per se criminal offense in Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Belgium and Switzerland, and is punishable by fines and jail sentences.

Much of the controversy surrounding the claims of Holocaust deniers centers upon the methods used to present arguments that the Holocaust allegedly never happened. Numerous accounts have been given (including evidence presented in court cases) of claimed "facts" and "evidence"; however, independent research has shown these claims to be based upon flawed research, biased statements, and even deliberately falisified evidence. Opponents of Holocaust denial have compiled detailed accounts of numerous instances where this evidence has been altered or manufactured (see Nizkor Project and David Irving). Evidence presented by Holocaust deniers has also failed to stand up to scrutiny in courts of law (see Fred A. Leuchter), further questioning its veracity.

The arguments over the legitimacy of Holocaust denial and its historical accuracy (or lack thereof) have led to the revisionists' arguments being examined and, in many instances, debunked. This has not stopped the revisionists from promoting their beliefs as historical fact in the face of what they believe is a conspiracy.

History of Holocaust denial

Research into Holocaust revisionism has revealed that anti-Semitism has been an important part of the revisionist philosophy since the very beginnings of the movement. With few exceptions, charges of anti-Jewish bias have been leveled against many revisionists over the years – charges that they have rarely denied.

Scholars credit the very first Holocaust deniers as the Nazis themselves. Historians have documented evidence that Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other sign of mass extermination of human beings, as Germany's defeat became imminent and the Nazi leaders realized they would most likely be captured and brought to trial. Following the end of World War II, many of the former leaders of the SS left Germany and began using their propaganda skills to defend their actions (or, their critics contended, to rewrite history). Shortly after the war, denial materials began to appear. One of the first published revisionist screeds (though the word "revisionist" was not used to describe it) was Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe (1950), in which he offered a brief defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats and the Pan-German League for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's rise to power. Meinecke was openly anti-Semitic; nonetheless, he was a respected historian.

The beginnings of modern-day Holocaust revisionism are shrouded in obscurity. Public challenges to the accepted factual accounts of the holocaust first began to appear in the 1960s, with French historian Paul Rassinier publishing The Drama of the European Jews in 1964. Rassinier was himself a Holocaust survivor (he was imprisoned in Buchenwald for his socialist beliefs), and modern-day revisionists continue to cite his works as scholarly research that questions the accepted facts of the Holocaust. Critics and opponents of revisionism, however, note that Rassinier's own anti-Semitic views influenced his viewpoint; more importantly, he was arrested in Germany in 1943, and had long since been transferred to Poland by the time the extermination was fully in progress.

The Holocaust revisionist movement grew into full strength in the 1970s with the publication of Arthur Butz' The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry in 1976 and David Irving's Hitler's War in 1977. These books, seen as the basis of much of the reivisionists' arguments, brought other similarly inclined individuals into the fold.

In 1979 the Institute for Historical Review was founded as an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the "myth" of the Holocaust.

The Zündel trials

Canadian resident Ernst Zündel operates a small-press publishing house called Samisdat Publishing, which publishes and distributes Holocaust-denial material such as Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood (a/k/a Richard Verrall (a British neo-Nazi leader). In 1985, he was tried and convicted under a "false news" law and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court for "disseminating and publishing material denying the Holocaust." Zündel gained considerable notoriety after this conviction, and a number of free-speech activists stepped forward to defend his right to publish his opinion. His conviction was overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court of Canada declared the "false news" law unconstitutional.

Zündel established his own Web site to publicize his viewpoints. In January 2002, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal delivered a ruling in a complaint involving his website, found contravening the Canadian Human Rights Act. The court ordered Zündel to cease communicating hate messages. In February 2003, the INS arrested him in Tennessee on an immigration violations matter, and few days later, Zündel was sent back to Canada, where he has since had refugee status. In prison since then, Zündel may ultimately risk deportation to Germany, under whose laws he could be prosecuted for disseminating hate propaganda.

Ken McVay and alt.revisionism

In the mid-1990s, the popularity of the Internet brought new international exposure to many organizations, including Holocaust deniers and other groups. A number of authority figures stated publicly that the Internet allowed hate groups to introduce their messages to a widespread audience, and it was feared that Holocaust denial would gain in popularity as a result. But this was not the case, largely due to the efforts of Ken McVay and the participants in the Usenet newsgroup alt.revisionism.

McVay, a Canadian resident, was disturbed by the efforts of organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center to suppress the speech of the Holocaust deniers. On alt.revisionism he began a campaign of "truth, fact, and evidence," working with other participants on the newsgroup to uncover factual information about the Holocaust and counter the arguments of the deniers by proving them to be based upon misleading evidence, false statements, and outright lies. He founded the Nizkor Project to expose the activities of the Holocaust deniers, who responded to McVay with personal attacks and slander. McVay received a number of death threats, and the Nizkor Project soon became the number-one online foe of many Holocaust deniers, some of whom were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

File:Denying the holocaust.jpg
Book cover: Denying The Holocaust

The Irving affair

In 1998, the best-selling British historian David Irving filed suit against American author Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books, claiming that Lipstadt had libeled him in her book Denying the Holocaust. The statements made by Lipstadt included the accusation that Irving deliberately twisted and misrepresented evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoint. Under British law, which seeks primarily to protect the reputation of an individual, Lipstadt and her publisher bore the full burden of demonstrating not only that they had not shown "reckless disregard" for the truth (as would be the case in America), but also that the statements made were true.

Lipstadt and Penguin hired British lawyer Anthony Julius and Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans to present her case. Evans spent two years examining Irving's work, and presented evidence of Irving's misrepresentations, including that Irving had knowingly used forged documents as a source. One of the few witnesses called on Irving's behalf was American evolutionary psychology professor Kevin B. MacDonald. The presiding judge, Charles Gray, was persuaded by the evidence presented by Evans and others and wrote a long and decisive verdict in favor of Lipstadt, calling Irving a "right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist," and confirming the accusations of Lipstadt and Evans.

Some journalists called the verdict a blow to free speech, although others pointed out that it was Irving who had initiated legal action for damages from the publication of Lipstadt's work, and hence no one's speech was restricted.

Public reactions to Holocaust denial

Seven European Union member countries, including France and Germany have passed Holocaust denial laws making it illegal to make claims equivalent to those of Holocaust denial.[2] Many people who do not deny that the Holocaust occurred nevertheless oppose such restrictions of free speech, including Noam Chomsky. An uproar resulted when Serge Thion used one of Chomsky's essays as a foreword to a book of holocaust denial essays. Many Holocaust deniers see these laws as a confirmation of their own beliefs, arguing that the truth does not need to be legally enforced.

In the Middle East, the Syrian government, as well as the Palestinian Authority publish Holocaust denial literature. These works are popular sellers in several Arab nations. Denials of the Holocaust have been regularly promoted by various Arab leaders and in various media throughout the Middle East.[3][4] In August 2002 the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-up, an Arab League think-tank whose Chairman, Sultan Bin Zayed Al Nahayan, served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, promoted a Holocaust denial symposium in Abu Dhabi. [5] Hamas leaders have also been promoters of Holocaust denial; Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi held that the Holocaust never occurred, that Zionists were behind the action of Nazis, and that Zionists funded Nazism. A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried "the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis" [6]

Many Neo-Nazi groups and people associated with them believe that the Holocaust never occurred.

Many Jews protest that Holocaust denial trivializes the suffering caused to victims of the Holocaust when it juxtaposes it with accounts of the millions (most popular estimate is 2.4 million, but some Holocaust deniers put the figure as high as 10 million) of Germans who died of starvation and from Russian pogroms immediately after WWII. They feel this is an attempt to make the Germans feel they don't deserve full blame for the war crimes of the Nazis, on the basis that the Soviets, British, and Americans committed similar war crimes without repercussions. This position is based on the work of James Bacque, Ernst Mayo, and others.

Recently the terms Holocaust industry and Shoah business, have come into vogue among those who believe Jewish leaders use the Holocaust for financial and political gain. The term Holocaust industry was coined by Norman Finkelstein, a Jew and the son of Auschwitz survivors. He fully accepts the fact that the Holocaust occurred, but believes that its memory is being dishonestly exploited. However, his term has also been picked up by Holocaust deniers who believe the Holocaust was faked for the purpose of financial and political gain, although that usage is much less frequent.

Other genocide denials

Other acts of genocide and atrocity have met similar attempts to deny and minimize. Some examples are the Nanjing Massacre (1937) by the Japanese army, which many Japanese politicians, such as Ishihara Shintaro, have denied happened. The Armenian Genocide by Turkey is denied by the Turkish government. Sometimes the motivation for holocaust denial is to avoid disturbing truths, and sometimes it is strictly nationalist, or ideological.

References

About Holocaust deniers

  • Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994. Debunking Holocaust revisionism.
  • Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2002 (ISBN 0465021530). As well as the story of the Irving case, this is an excellent case study on historical research.

By Holocaust deniers

  • Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Newport Beach: Institute for Historical Review, 1994. This is a standard work of Holocaust revisionism, but not a good place for beginners to start.

Background

Denials of the Holocaust

Refutations of revisionism

Audio testimony of Holocaust survivors

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